Ethnographic Opportunity Analysis

This afternoon TheAnthroGuys are giving a presentation about our core competency: Analytic Induction. Our objective is to introduce entrepreneurship students to Analytic Induction in search of opportunities to “add value“.

We will be in a lecture hall of entrepreneurship students at Fresno State. Incidentally, the name of the lecture hall is, “Pete P Peters”. As I often tell students of ethnography, reality is usually far more interesting than fiction once you start actually noticing it.

Ethnographers and entrepreneurs share a reliance on inductive skills to accomplish their goals. Once this is understood, we can learn a great deal from each other.

3) expand those notes into a brief report about what you found. DESCRIPTION

–Rather than looking into a completely innovative idea (service or product), the goal is to 1) observe something that already works; 2) observe it in great detail; then 3) begin to understand it in such detail that you can 4) make concrete suggestions about improving it.

Steps

–1. Find a routine, taken-for-granted task/service/product,

–2. “Hang out” and “thickly describe” it in a notebook,

–3. In a one page pitch, suggest some sort of innovation that will add value. DUE: next Wednesday October 17th by 3:00pm in class.

–The best observations will be published on our blog and presented in class on October 24th.

We will return to their class to continue this discussion. Our hope is that some – if not all – of these students will see the value of this skill set and in so doing, realize that “thinking out of the box” can be learned.

Assessment

We have included how the assignments are evaluated but the the main point is that this is NOT rocket science. Rather , it’s social science! Applied systematically, humans’ natural observational skills can notice things that are typically ignored. With some analysis, suggestions can be made to improve lives, products, profit margins, whatever.

If you have further questions about the assignment or the course, feel free to contact us at: jmullooly@csufrenso.edu